Diplomats clash over U.N. resolution

Wednesday

Sep 18, 2013 at 12:01 AMSep 18, 2013 at 11:27 AM

Diplomats from five key nations kicked off talks yesterday on a U.N. Security Council resolution to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons, even as France and Russia clashed over Moscow's insistence that Syrian President Bashar Assad is not guilty of the Aug. 21 poison-gas attack on civilians in his capital.

Diplomats from five key nations kicked off talks yesterday on a U.N. Security Council resolution to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons, even as France and Russia clashed over Moscow’s insistence that Syrian President Bashar Assad is not guilty of the Aug. 21 poison-gas attack on civilians in his capital.

The negotiations in New York among American, British, French, Russian and Chinese diplomats focused on a draft resolution on Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal to be put before the 15-nation Security Council.

The U.S.-British-French draft is intended to support a U.S.-Russian deal reached in Geneva on Saturday calling for Syria to account for its chemical weapons within a week and for the removal and destruction of the arsenal by mid-2014.

U.N. diplomats said it remained unclear when a vote on the resolution could take place. The current draft leaves the door open to the use of force in the event of noncompliance by Syria, but diplomats said Russia certainly would demand that such provisions be deleted.

President Barack Obama, who had threatened U.S. military strikes in response to the August attack, said that even with the deal to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons, ultimately there must be a political transition in Syria in which Assad gives up power.

“Keep in mind that it’s very hard to imagine that civil war dying down if, in fact, Assad is still in power,” Obama told the U.S. Spanish-language network Telemundo.

Obama said it remains his goal to “transition” Assad out of power in a way that protects religious minorities and ensures that Islamist extremists do not gain ground in Syria.

In Washington yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Obama administration’s strategy. In additon, one of Kerry’s deputies, Wendy Sherman, spoke by telephone with House Foreign Affairs Committee members.

The meeting of diplomats from the five permanent, veto-wielding powers of the Security Council came a day after U.N. investigators confirmed the use of sarin nerve gas in the Aug. 21 attack. The United States, Britain and France said the report proved beyond any doubt that Assad’s forces were responsible.

But at a meeting in Moscow with top French diplomats, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the report produced no proof that Assad’s troops carried out the attack and Russia still suspects rebel forces did it. Russia has been Assad’s most-powerful backer during the civil war, delivering arms and, with China, blocking three U.N. resolutions meant to pressure Assad.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the report left no doubt that Assad’s forces were to blame for the attack that the United States says killed more than 1,400 people.

Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded yesterday on the Syrian side of the main Bab al-Hawa border crossing into Turkey, killing at least seven people and wounding 20, the Turkish news agency Dogan said.

The car bomb exploded a day after Turkish forces shot down a Syrian helicopter that had entered Turkey’s airspace.

Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.

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